{"id":2507,"date":"2004-12-18T22:55:09","date_gmt":"2004-12-19T03:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/12\/18\/2507.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:47:29","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:47:29","slug":"book-report-down-and-out-in-th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/12\/18\/book-report-down-and-out-in-th\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Well, and I had downloaded<\/a> Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom<\/I> onto my hard drive quite some time ago, some months after I became aware that it was available.\n

And then last week I got it out from the library and read it.\n

Anyway, it’s an entertaining enough book, in its way, and a lot of the funny stuff struck me as actually funny, which is impressive in a book like that. My problem is that the book is primarily a provocative thought-experiment, and I find the thought experiment annoying in ways that I’m sure have already been discussed to death. Which is my problem ... if I had read the thing last year when everybody else did, I could have been part of the discussions at the time. Not that I would have likely bothered, as the discussions took place on-line, and I would have been even more annoyed by the discussions than by the book.\n

Still, just to record the thoughts that I’m sure have been kicked around already: I’m assuming that the point of the whuffie thing was not to say that it would be good, but to make us think about the ways in which it wouldn’t be good, and therefore even to mention those low-whuffie Gypsies that were slaughtered and not revived from backup would be heavy-handed. Still. I’m thrilled to death that there aren’t gangs roaming around, high on whatnot, beating up low-whuffie people, but I can’t figure out why not, particularly as you would get more whuffie that you care about from your gang for doing it than down-whuffie from anybody who bothered to find out and disapprove. But, yeah, ok, all those people just weren’t Bitchun, and, y’know, conveniently died and stuff. So that stuff just made me cranky, which is always bad because I’m less likely to laugh at jokes, and more likely to pick fights with plot points.\n

Speaking of which, all of the major decisions made by the ad-hocs seem to be made absolutely ass-backwards and wrong. That is, the first decision (let’s bypass normal procedure to screw with the ride) is put over on sympathy whuffie and a cute girl. Then, the decision to let the villainess take over is made on rep and nothing. Then, the decision to kick her out again is made on anger and possessiveness. Then, the decision to let her back in again is made on the touching mother-daughter scene manufactured just for that purpose. Then, the decision to kick her out again is made because she turns out to be even more of a crazy monomaniac than the protagonist. Notice that none of this has anything to do with the quality of the ride itself. It was pretty much who had managed to use the best pathetic rhetoric (that is, rhetoric using pathos) to convince the ad-hoc that the other guy had weapons of mass destruction. This combined with the bizarre ups and downs of Dan’s whuffie, where he goes from sky-high to zero and back up and back down without noticeably changing his actual character, seems to make whuffie-based decision-making so obviously bad that it barely seems worth using it to spark discussion.\n

Then, you know, I somehow hadn’t managed to figure out that Cory Doctorow was Mr. Boingboing<\/a>. There’s something about knowing that the author has a PageRank of 8 (and another of 7) that colors his whole discussion of whuffie. I’m just sayin’.\n

Anyway, what is clearly brilliant about the book is that calling<\/I> it whuffie and portraying it in that way absolutely hits the cultural nerve. I can’t explain it (which in itself is a sign that it hits home), but clearly whuffie is something a lot of us are feeling the edges of, and we want to know what it is, and whether it’s good or bad, and how to use it, both individually in our own lives and together in the broader society. Mr. Doctorow has hit on a nice way to talk about the world, and that’s a tremendous thing. Even if I’m still cranky.\n

Thank you,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, and I had downloaded Cory Doctorow\u2019s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom onto my hard drive quite some time ago, some months after I became aware that it was available. And then last week I got it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2507"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2507\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17241,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2507\/revisions\/17241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}